Any ETA on a thunderbolt equipped chassis?

[mercutiouk]

Hi, been around a few laptop forums looking for answers on this, as you're a forum and seller in one I can see me spending a reasonable amount of time here

I'm looking to build a "modular" desktop setup with a thunderbolt equipped laptop at it's core. I get to pull the plug and take it on the road with most of my data and settings etc rather than having a desktop with a gaming laptop that's normally gathering dust (saves on keeping them both patched up and syncing settings etc too). When docked it'll have a decent desktop GPU on a thunderbolt to PCIe bridge board and probably my raid array via a similar route.

When do you expect to see chassis through your door with thunderbolt? There's a couple of laptops announced that will have it soon but I've not heard much from Clevo who seem to be your main supplier. I have sent a sales mail with the rest of my requirements but I figured a general "heads up" reply here would give me enough to plan around

[PCS]

Welcome to our forums

At present we do not have any ETAs on Thunderbolt enabled chassis. As soon as we hear anything we'll post back here.

[mercutiouk]

Welcome to our forums

At present we do not have any ETAs on Thunderbolt enabled chassis. As soon as we hear anything we'll post back here.

Sorry to bug but still nothing?

[PCS]

Thunderbolt is only just coming through on desktop motherboards - you are looking at 3 months+ for our laptops.

[dangro474]

I take it this is a completely different type of "thunderbolt" port to those available on macbooks, which as far as I know only serves as a rediculously costly solution to the size of the chassis. £40 adapters for HDMI, oh dear.

[PCS]

UPDATE

Thunderbolt enabled laptops will not be with us until around October 2013, so they're 14 months away yet!

[mercutiouk]

I take it this is a completely different type of "thunderbolt" port to those available on macbooks, which as far as I know only serves as a rediculously costly solution to the size of the chassis. £40 adapters for HDMI, oh dear.

Well, that's the use on macs, sure. Thunderbolt IS used for other things but they mostly just plug screens into it. You can put a screen at the end of a thunderbolt chain of devices, so long as it's last in chain it works (something like that anyway).

With PC's (and macs will maybe catch up too) there's a nice feature with it: External PCIe bridge card. You get a box you can put a proper desktop GPU in so when at home you get a much beefier machine. I'm taking the idea further and having a decent raid setup attached in a similar way. The 10GB link IS a little slow for very high end cards but you still get 80-90% of the performace from eg a GTX680 as you would plugged into a motherboard, if PCIe 3.0 gets here by the time thunderbolts working properly on laptops it'll be able to go full whack.

I'm planning my next full rig purchase (currently SB i7 and getting married next year so I should really wait) to be a laptop with a thunderbolt to PCIe bridge box. I'm home quite a lot but spend maybe 2 months a year in Greece so being able to take the important bits of my main rig with me rather than keeping a seperate laptop "in sync" with a desktop PC or just being able to unplug and go sit in the garden while it still being a slightly cut down version of my main rig is (in my opinion) a fairly good idea. I'll still be having a very basic box under the desk (probably take a smallish rack case and build something into it and fit a cheap set of rails into my desk) so when not sat infront I can plug the raid array into the desktop (which will also have thunderbolt) for access to the raid over wireless if i'm wanting to use the laptop elsewhere in the house and I get to have 1 set of expensive parts that get plugged into whatever i'm using at the moment. Lastly if I have a buddy over and we fancy a little multiplayer I can unplug and use the laptop, plug the GPU on thunderbolt into my desktop and I have 2 full gaming PC's again. It makes a lot of sense imo

Without thunderbolt it's VERY hobbled on the GPU front, doable with expresscard to PCIe adapters but they are only 1x PCIe (single lane) so VERY slow.

[Northern-Loop]

UPDATE

Thunderbolt enabled laptops will not be with us until around October 2013, so they're 14 months away yet!

Gutted about that! I was just reading about External GPU solutions and very keen to go that route.

[mercutiouk]

Again, a gentle poke, still looking like fall next year or there any kind of revised timescale with Haswell announced?

[PCS]

The only news to report here is that Haswell has been delayed until later on in 2013. Here are some sources:

http://www.techpowerup.com/178068/In...ow-at-CES.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Ivy...obo,16588.html

Nothing new on Thunderbolt yet...